Hadara Bar-Nadav navigates the devastating depths of loss, with Emily Dickinson as her guide

The poems in Lullaby (with Exit Sign), explore the very nature of the elegy as rite, memorial, mechanism for healing, and raw utterance. Bar-Nadav asks, what is the shape of grief—its forms, silences, and sounds? The muscular music of her language and whip-sharp syntax join forces with startling imagery. Prose poems dominate the collection, held in place by the phantom scaffolding of lineated verse in which the poet listens for her father who “knocks on a little paper door.”

“This grand third book is a scrupulously crafted, brilliantly conceived sequence of poems. An essential and ravishing work.”—Lynn Emanuel, judge

Awards/Recognition:

Winner of the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize (2012)

HADARA BAR-NADAV is the author of A Glass of Milk to Kiss Goodbye, winner of the Margie First Book Prize 2005, and This Frame Called Ruin (New Issues, 2012). She is associate professor of English at the University of Missouri–Kansas City.